On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 12:31 PM, Matt Goodall <matt.good...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Servers should definitely not transform a HEAD to a GET. > > Transforming HEAD to GET and then discarding the body is often not a bad > default but an application may well want to handle the HEAD explicitly. For > instance, an application's HEAD handler may only need to check an ETag in a > database before returning a "304 Not Modified" response (with the correct > Content-Length and no body, of course). > > Similarly, it's almost certainly a bad idea for a WSGI server or middleware > to change the Content-Length header in the application's HTTP response > because there may be no body to look at. > If a piece of output-transforming middleware is being picky, it could change HEAD to GET on the incoming request, then throw away the response body on its own. This is not a great strategy, but at least it seems like it will create a generally correct result. -- Ian Bicking | http://blog.ianbicking.org
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